Bookweirdest (27 page)

“Might as well get a start on this,” Norman said.

He selected a page he’d written describing the Shrubberies. He could have chosen his room, but for some reason, he’d found it easier to describe the kitchen at breakfast time, with his sister being her usual annoying self and his father grumpy before his first coffee.

He ripped the page into strips as he usually did. It felt good to eat paper like a ribbon of pasta or a long roll of liquorice, feeding it slowly into his mouth and letting it dissolve before he chewed off the end.

Malcolm watched as Norman fed two strips into the top of Jerome’s coffee pot. The stoat’s eyes widened into an unspoken question. Norman just shrugged. It could work, couldn’t it?

They watched the pot until it bubbled over and Jerome plucked it gingerly from the flames. From inside his cloak, he removed a tiny porcelain cup, smiling as he poured the thick brown sludge into it. “Does anybody else want some?” he asked. Norman and Malcolm were quick to shake their heads. Norman had to stop himself from grimacing.

Meg took a single polite sip and handed it back. “That’s plenty for me. You have it.”

Jerome knocked it back in two quick gulps and smacked his lips. “Let’s get back to that escape route,” he urged, as if just the taste of the coffee had revived him.

The three human children took turns boring the hole for Malcolm to slip through. Norman tried to do his part, but Jerome was taller, stronger and more determined. When everyone else decided to give up for the night, Jerome insisted on pressing on just a little bit longer. Norman sat on the floor of the tunnel and watched the boy who would become his father work at their escape route. He had pitied Jerome once, felt sorry for the orphaned boy locked up in the library. Now he didn’t know how he felt.

The dirt floor of the tunnel was surprisingly comfortable to lie down on. Weariness can make any bed comfortable, but it was getting cold in the tunnel. Meg was already dozing under Jerome’s cape when Norman pulled on his sweater and covered himself with his knapsack. It helped when Malcolm curled up on his chest. Norman felt the warmth of his body even through the sweater.

“I’ll be back for you,” Norman whispered. It killed him to have to bookweird away without his friend.

“I know,” the stoat replied confidently. He seemed to settle down to sleep for the night, but after a few moments, he spoke up again. “That trick with the paper in the coffee? Do you think that’ll work?”

“I doubt it,” Norman replied with a yawn. He really didn’t think it had much of a chance.

N
orman could tell without opening his eyes that he was back at the Shrubberies. He knew the sound of the sparrows by now, and the smell of pancakes downstairs told him something else: his mother was home. He knew this not just because he thought Kit was incapable of making pancakes. After all, Esme could probably have managed, and they would be tiny, perfectly delicious rabbit-sized pancakes. No, a boy knows the smell of his mother’s pancakes. There was just one doubt that kept him in bed, unwilling yet to discover the truth. Would his father be here too, or was he stuck in the tunnels beneath San Savino, still unaware that he really belonged in a whole other time and place?

He rolled over and dangled an arm over the side of the bed. As he dragged his fingers across the floor, they brushed against a pile of bedclothes. He opened his eyes to find a small figure asleep beneath a flowered comforter. His first thought was of Malcolm, but the lump was too big to be a stoat. He finally spotted the tattered stuffed yellow dinosaur and the little pink fingers that clutched it. Dora. What was she doing curled up with her comforter and her old stuffed animal on the rug beside the bed?

He woke her gently, and she surprised him by wrapping her arms around him and clinging to him tightly. Norman wasn’t
used to hugging his little sister, but he decided he was enough of a hero to manage it. When Dora smelled the pancakes she quickly released him, as if she’d just realized what she was doing, and rushed downstairs. Norman followed her more slowly, prepared for anything.

He was tired of the bookweird, but if his father wasn’t there, he would have to go back. He would save him from the fire all over again if he had to. He’d stop the duel in the cellars. He’d tell Malcolm to aim for Black John’s right hand first, and if it came to it, he’d dig out the floorboards of the cellar himself. He wasn’t going to let the bookweird hurt anyone he loved again.

And so it was a relief to see Edward Vilnius standing there in the kitchen, leaning against the counter with a cup of coffee and a grin.

“Good morning, Spiny,” he said, raising his coffee cup as if in a toast. “Slept well, as always, I see.”

“Better help yourself to some pancakes before they’re all gone,” his mother told him.

He didn’t move right away. He was watching both his parents, observing their expressions and their gestures, seeing if he could pick out any echoes of the childhood versions. Maybe something in the way his father stooped, almost apologetically, echoed something he’d seen in Savino—the tall youth ducking under the huge beams of the library, the boy hiding away among monks. His mother’s eyebrows, raised in bemused expectation as he stood there thinking, was something he’d seen in the childhood Meg, but there was a softness in her eyes that hadn’t been there in the young girl he’d met in the desert fortress.

“Thank you for watching Dora last night. That was very mature of you. I didn’t see any emergency messages on my mobile phone and there are no reports of police or fire being called to the scene, so all in all a good night. Did Mrs. Lamley from next door at the Hedges look in on you like I asked?”

Norman wasn’t sure what to say. Did his mother really believe that this was what had happened, or was she asking him to go along
with her cover story? He took a largish bite of pancake and made a sound that could have been either “uh-uh” or “uh-huh.”

“Where did you guys go last night, anyway?” Dora asked.

“We went to an opera,” his father replied, singing the word “opera” in a deep baritone.

“Yes,” his mother added breezily. “An opera based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe.”

“I think I might have fallen asleep,” Edward said, “but I’m pretty sure the butler did it.”

“I’m sure you fell asleep,” Meg scolded playfully. “The people in the box next to us thought your snoring was part of the score. And it was the Prussian field marshal who did it, not the butler.”

“I should have known,” his father replied, snapping his fingers as if mad at himself for missing it.

Norman could feel himself grinning. They were back, both of them exactly as they were supposed to be. He didn’t care how it had happened—whether it was the trick of the paper in the coffee, or if Meg had managed it herself. He didn’t even care if Kit was somehow behind it. For all he cared, it could even have been another accident of the bookweird. He was just glad to have them here as adults, back in the real world.

Malcolm! The thought struck him and wiped the smile off his face. What had happened to Malcolm? Was he stranded alone in the tunnel beneath San Savino?

His mother had been watching him out of the corner of her eye the whole time.

“We got you something at the bookstore while we were out—one of those Tattersnail or Bramblebush books. I’m not sure if you’ve read this one.”

She removed a thick paperback from her purse and slid it across the counter. His mother knew very well that the series was called Undergrowth, but it amused her to pretend not to. It used to bother Norman, back when he didn’t have bigger things to worry about. He grabbed the thick paperback from the counter and sat down to read the back cover, holding it in his left hand while he shovelled
pancakes into his mouth with his right. It was hard to smile with pancakes stuffed in his mouth, but as he read, Norman did.

Malcolm’s disappearance from Lochwarren and the loss of the map had turned into a whole other book! Part of Norman wanted to jump right into
Legacy of the Mustelids
, not just to start reading it but to fight at his friend’s side again. He was ready to run right upstairs and start eating the prologue, but then he remembered with a pang of regret that he’d sworn off the bookweird. He’d come so close to losing everything. He’d be an idiot to start messing with that now. Maybe he’d just read a few chapters and see if he was needed.

Was that small band of Santandarian archers enough, or did he need the help of the legendary giant Norman Strong Arm? And surely that band of archers wasn’t just a coincidence. They had to be the rabbits of Willowbraid. Norman had done nothing to get them back to Undergrowth. Was it Kit who had helped them—fickle, unpredictable Uncle Kit—or was it just another accident of the bookweird?

Where was Uncle Kit, anyway? Norman pushed his plate away and made for the stairs.

“Dishes?” his dad asked, tilting his head towards the sink.

“I’ll look after it,” his mother said indulgently. That was weird too. She was usually a stickler for chores.

He bolted up the stairs before she changed her mind. There was no sign of Kit. The main bedroom looked like his parents had slept there. The library was the usual mess of his father’s papers, and the study was tidy, with his mother’s laptop open on the desk. It was as if Kit had never been there—and of course he hadn’t, hadn’t been at
this
Shrubberies. Kit had had Norman and Dora at his own version of his childhood home, stranded and in some strange half-fictional place between the real world and a real book.

Just the thought of it made Norman check the window overlooking the back garden. No unicorn appeared to be grazing there. There was no fountain filled with dolphins, marble or otherwise, and no turret-shaped addition. In the distance, he could see the edge of the woods where the rabbits lived. Something told him that not all the talking rabbits of England had returned to Undergrowth. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but he really believed that the little town of Willowbraid still rang with the sound of church bells from the Cathedral of St. Peter the Martyr and the hammer strikes of Wayland the smithy.

But the bookweird had thrown too many surprises at Norman for him to feel safe just yet. Something still nagged at him. The image of Sir Hugh using his last breaths to bid Jerome—his father, Edward Vilnius—goodbye stuck with him. What was left of
The Secret in the Library
now that Hugh and John of Nantes were dead and Jerome had vanished? Norman remembered the knapsack. He rushed back to his room. Sure enough it was there, lying in a tangle with his bedclothes.

He unbuckled the leather strap quickly, shoving his hand down through the piles of figs and apples and assorted bits of paper until he felt the weave of the cloth-bound book. It still existed. The book itself had not vanished, but what of the world it contained? Figs and apples spilled out over his bed as he withdrew the book anxiously.

At first he could see no change. It looked like the same book. On flipping it open, he could still see the slim edge where Malcolm had sliced the endpapers with his rapier, but the next page was blank, and the page after that. Dumbfounded, he flipped through the rest of the book. The pages were all like that, completely empty. Norman had seen something like this before: when he’d first messed up
The Brothers of Lochwarren
, the letters had become unreadable. But he’d never seen the pages completely erased like this. He closed the book hurriedly and examined the blue cloth cover. It too was blank. The silver embossed lettering of the title and the name of the author had vanished. There was no lettering at all, not on the front or the back or the spine. It was a blank bound book, like a diary or a writer’s notebook. Its emptiness was almost scary. He shoved it back in the knapsack and buckled the straps tight. He didn’t want to look at it.

Did the world of the book still exist now that the book itself existed only as a memory in the heads of its readers? And how few were those readers? Was his mother the only person alive who had read
The Secret in the Library
all the way through? Did she even remember it now that it had been erased? He wondered if he’d ever summon the courage to ask her.